This talk was given at a local TEDx event in New York, produced independently of the TED Conferences. For a long time, science has been made out to be dense, complex, and inaccessible. Sara explains how we can fix science's bad rap, and how to make the field more exciting and engaging to young people - especially students like her.

Over the past couple of years I’ve had the opportunity to design and develop a couple of astronomy research websites, including the first iteration of OzGrav. This talk reminded me of two of my favourite “what a mess” research websites that can only be described as disasters from a design perspective…

Theoretical Particle Physics Group – University of Melbourne

ARC Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics in 3D

About Sara Camnasio

I met Sara a couple of years ago at Astro Hack Week 2016, held at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and GitHub HQ in downtown San Francisco. With a strong interest in science communication and multi-media, I remember her website being really impressive and full of creative side projects. It definitely made me think more carefully about how I could present my own independent projects and experiences as part of broader career portfolio. Over the past few years she’s managed to make the successful transition from astronomy research assistant/graduate student at the American Museum of Natural History to designer; creating engaging user experiences at Designit.

Oh, did I mention she’s also a 2017 National Geographic Young Explorer (wow!)…

The new website for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery launched today. This took just under a week to build, using the Weebly platform and fair bit of customisation to ensure there were no cross-browser and responsiveness issues. The OzGrav logo was designed in-house and the same colour scheme was adopted for the website.

Yeshe and I discussed the current site, and went through the feedback from the OzGrav collaboration. I spent the morning ironing out the last few kinks and tweaking some more of the content. There are still a number of pages to be added once their content has been approved; the Governance, Scientific Advisory, Research Translation, and Diversity & Equity Committees, as well Research Associates which are yet to be determined, and specific instrumentation, data, and astrophysics project pages. These are likely to be added mid-March, after the OzGrav Chief Investigators Retreat.

The rest of the day was spent planning for the citizen science grant, which is due at the end of the week. Yeshe and I discussed the project with Alan Duffy who will lead the public engagement aspect, should the project be funded.

In February 2016, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo gravitational wave collaboration announced the first detection of gravitational waves. This historic detection by aLIGO, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational‐Wave Observatory, marked the end of century-long quest to detect ripples in space-time and "listen" to the final signal from two merging black holes. Needless to say there was a flurry of excitement from astronomers around the world. In May 2016 I was approached by OzGrav's director, to help prepare for the final interview with the Australian Research Council (ARC) that would secure $31.3 million in funding later that year. The recent appointment of OzGrav's Chief Operating Officer, means the centre is now up and running, albeit with a small leadership team and a core group of leading astronomers.

Core management and administrative staff are yet to be appointed. Shortly, the position of Education & Public Outreach Coordinator and Media & Digital Marketing Manager will be advertised. Several postdoctoral fellows will also be appointed for research positions at the University of Melbourne, the University of Western Australia, and the University of Adelaide.

In November last year the Turnbull Government announced a $4 million boost for Australia's growing citizen science movement, to open a door for the general public to participate in, and make real contributions to, Australian research. The Citizen Science Grants programme is part of a four-year, $29.8 million, Inspiring Australia - Science Engagement Programme. Grants are awarded on a competitive basis to support community participation in scientific research projects that have a national impact. So in addition to applying for new funding, the centre needs a website, especially if it wants to attract subsequent funding for research and citizen science projects, and industry partners to support its core instrumentation projects.

I spent the week working at Swinburne at Inspire9 in Richmond. Inspire9 is such a fantastic place to be for this type of work. You're constantly surrounded by creative people, and expertise to draw on.

Since OzGrav won't have a dedicated website administrator, the site needed to to be easily developed, deployed and managed. Although I prefer Squarespace, we decided to go with Weebly. The management team were already familiar with it and a bare bones structure was already in palce, it's versatile with many different page layourts, responsible enough for what OzGrav needs (one aspect where Squarespace excels) and it supports an intranet with multiple levels of access for multiple user groups, something that Squarespace doesn't do well. Of course this means a lot more customisation, a lot more tinkering with HTML and CSS, and more browser cross-browser and responsiveness issues than I would like. Aside from the overall design and site structure, I'm also creating the scientific content – translating the hardcore science from the original ARC grant, and the obscure terminology that comes with it – to stories that both public and research astronomers from other fields can understand.